Over the last year or so, a design trend in the web and mobile world has been transition animations, parallax effects, and the like. For many users, this can cause vestibular issues; the symptom is usually vertigo, or a feeling of motion sickness.

The issue was not well recognized until iOS 7 was released and overwhelmed users with an excessive amount of visual effects, especially parallax. Numerous articles were written about this issue, including iOS 7 and motion sickness by iMore. In a poll displayed on that article, about 28% of users reported having either mild or serious motion sickness with iOS7; this is not a formal study but still makes quite a statement. And at the time of writing, there are 100 comments on the article!

Pros and Cons

A study by Purdue University found that “although parallax scrolling enhanced certain aspects of the user experience, it did not necessarily improve the overall user experience”. Let’s take a look of pros and cons of parallax design.

The Accessibility Summit, an online conference on accessibility, took place earlier this week. The event is presented by the good folks at Environments for Humans (@e4h). The event was one day in the past few years but was extended to two days this year! If you attended or not, take a look at the great information in the Twitter stream using the hash tag #a11ySummit.

Dennis speaks with George Zamfir on his background, his activity in Toronto, and how Responsive Web Design (RWD) can benefit web accessibility. The conversation stems from George’s talk Responsive Web Design & Accessibility from the Accessibility Camp Toronto last fall. A notable quote from the 50-minute conversation:

As techniques for usability and accessibility have some cross-over, so do RWD and accessibility. Case in point, this recent article on Mashable, 6 Easy Ways to Make Your Website Tablet-Friendly. The main points of George’s presentation are that responsive web design: